The best horror movies of 2026 (so far)

This latest spin on ancient Egyptian undead antics eschews both the classic creepy stalker approach and the action-adventure bravado of the Brendan Fraser-led series. It plumps instead for a domestic setting, where a long-lost daughter – found wrapped in bandages within a sarcophagus – returns home in a seriously debilitated state, before things turn nasty. At first it feels closer to The Exorcist, then tilts into sillier Evil Dead territory, paying only desiccated-lip service to the monster of its title.

A group of traumatised teens must survive a night with a rabid chimp in this Cujo-meets-1970s-PG-Tips-ad horror movie. Director Johannes Roberts works with a smaller menace than the great white sharks in his 2017 thriller 47 Meters Down but doesn’t let that get in the way of the smart tension-building and frequent violent crescendoes. Jane Goodall will turn in her grave, but you’ll believe a humble chimpanzee can go full King Kong.

Built on a killer premise – hear the screech of the Aztec Death Whistle and you’ll die in the way you’re supposed to die in the future – Corin Hardy’s high school horror flick is an entertaining throwback to the ’80s and ’90s heyday of the genre. Likeable performances from the young cast – especially Dafne Keen and Sophie Nélisse – make the inventive kills feel all the more impactful and the whole thing flies on a love for macabre movies. Gorehounds rejoice! 

Screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Presence) turns his 2019 novel into a fun bout of retro-flavoured sci-fi splatter, in which a mind-controlling space fungus tries to break out of a subterranean US military container hidden beneath a small-town self-storage facility. Joe ‘Stranger Things’ Keery and Georgina ‘Barbarian’ Campbell are the put-upon employees tasked with saving the planet, in a pleasingly splurgey and sparky throwback to VHS nasties of old.

Horror-making double act Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett return for a second instalment that doesn’t exactly stretch the kill-the-rich formula but certainly pours a few dozen buckets of fresh blood over it. Samara Weaving is the hunted bride again, turning the tables on a fresh batch of hateable billionaires, only now with her irate sister (Kathryn Newton) in tow. Weaving, a star in the making, is an even more wholehearted final girl this time: a snarling badass who never quite loses her humanity, even when she’s laying waste to the worst of our species. 

Adapting a simple puzzle-solving video game into a hallucinatory stress dream, Japanese director Genki Kawamura turns the Tokyo subway system into an MC Escher-like mind-trap teeming with mutated rats, the sound of crying children, sudden flashfloods and miles upon miles of endless, white-tiled corridors. A young man (Kazunari Ninomiya) steps off a train and into a kind of cosmic purgatory, where the only means of escape is snapping out of the patterns of behavior that brought him there in the first place. Sparse and claustrophobic, it’s a movie about the existential fear of getting lost – and of losing yourself.

We’ve had Zoom horrors and CCTV horrors, and now the genre is going direct to our eardrums via this podcast demonic possession chiller from A24 and newbie director Ian Tuason. Not everything in Undertone lives up to the premise – the skeptical thirtyomething co-host of a horror podcast (Nina Kiri) discovers that her skepticism was perhaps misplaced – but there’s plenty of fresh ideas here, and the deeply unsettling sound design will burrow into your cranium and stay there. Any sequel needs to involve Joe Rogan hosting the demon on his podcast to get its side of the story. 

In UK cinemas Apr 10

After a decade-plus of IP work, Sam Raimi makes a glorious return to his horror-comedy wheelhouse, only in this case the horror isn’t supernatural demons but the nightmare scenario of being stranded on a deserted island with your asshole boss – or, from the other perspective, the weird lady from accounting. Held down by pitch-perfect performances from Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien, what begins as Cast Away meets Misery sees the power dynamic flip and flip again until you’re unsure who to root for, if anyone. Along the way, Raimi dips into his bag of gross-outs, including bloodbaths, vomit facials, eye-gougings and testicular torture. What more could you want?

Nia DaCosta and Alex Garland, delivering his richest, gnarliest screenplay since Annihilation, reanimate the zombie genre with a bunker’s worth of fresh ideas and some truly dark story beats. We loved the narrative hairpins, bonkers needle drops and Jack O’Connell’s genuinely frightening cult leader. But it’s the sight of Ralph Fiennes’s great survivor Dr Kelson slow-dancing to New Romantic hits with Alpha infected Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) that stick in the mind. This one is horror with soul.